


Failed Crusades

by lodessa



Category: Angel: the Series, Firefly, Jossverse, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-19
Updated: 2006-07-19
Packaged: 2018-01-17 00:00:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1366528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The government… Alliance as it was called, had some part to play in the senior partner’s newest death and brimstone party plan, and Lindsey has been instructed to give them whatever they needed. Apparently, what they needed at the moment was some waifish girl. The girl was supposedly some sort of man-made telepath. Wolfram & Hart still specialized in the paranormal in this distant future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Failed Crusades

Lindsey knew he shouldn’t be surprised that he wasn’t able to escape Wolfram & Hart’s grasp, that they’d found a way to make his blackmail useless. In retrospect, he supposed, he should be glad that they didn’t toss him in a hell dimension for a couple millennia to wash the traitorous urges right out of him. Of course, this ‘verse, as the people around him referred to it, might as well have been a hell dimension Lindsey suspected. He sort of wondered whether the reason that Earth wasn’t around anymore was the firm’s beloved apocalypse and whether Angel had gone evil after all. It didn’t really matter though, because much had remained the same in the world and Lindsey still had clients to deal with, just now he was on a space station instead of located in LA. The government… Alliance as it was called, had some part to play in the senior partner’s newest death and brimstone party plan, and Lindsey has been instructed to give them whatever they needed. Apparently, what they needed at the moment was some waifish girl. The girl was supposedly some sort of man-made telepath. Wolfram & Hart still specialized in the paranormal in this distant future. 

Lindsey thought he knew why they kept him at his white collar job instead of a hell dimension or shoveling coal; the senior partners knew better than anyone that there are worse thing than death and physical anguish. The human mind was an incredibly efficient torture device that was built right in to each and every one of them. Lindsey wished that he’d never gone to Law School; he wished he’d stayed at home and been a farmer like his father and his grandfather before him. Things had been crap growing up, but why couldn’t Lindsey have just made enough cash to get the old farm back and gone home, instead of staying out in LA and making more and more money while his humanity rotted away. Old MacDonald had a farm…. There were still farms in this future, and Lindsey tried to get himself fired from his fancy job so that he could go work at one when he first got here. The senior partners must have known though, because they refused to demote him. Lindsey couldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed; the MacDonalds were still farmers here too; he’d looked it up on the web… no Cortex, and they had farms all over a place named Ceres. Looked like maybe the money he’d sent home to assuage his guilt had made a difference after all. Lindsey had been looking forward to joining them… thousands of years and he couldn’t make his way back from one bad decision and to the farm.

The file on this child, nothing that fragile looking could really be considered a woman, showed up on his desk and he put off looking at it for over three weeks because he was bored but he still didn’t want to do what the firm asked… simply because it is them asking. Eventually the boredom overtook him though, and he started looking through the information, not intending to do anything about it but merely to pass the time. The epic story that was unfolding had a strong appeal to Lindsey though. The way that the brother had played the hero, it was the kind of thing that he’d envisioned doing, back before he learned the way things really worked; actually, it was reminiscent of some of the stunts he’d tried in LA, except that Simon Tam had pulled it off successfully where he had waffled and failed. Somewhere out there, the Tam siblings were laughing at the Alliance and the firm, and Lindsey felt a little better knowing that. 

Lindsey didn’t sleep well anymore, hadn’t slept well since California. When he did sleep he dreamed, the sort of dreams he first started having during the feverish nights directly after the loss of his hand. At the time he had dreamed about his hand, feeling it whole again only to have it chopped off over and over again. He also dreamed about Lilah cutting off his other hand, a politely evil smile on her face, and about Darla… oh Darla. Better not to think about that. At this later date he mostly dreamed of the Tams, whom he’d never met but somehow felt closer to than anything else in the ‘verse; he’d started thinking of it as that. Lindsey knew just what they’d be like. River was lithe and more than a little crazed, not unlike the psychics he’d dealt with back in LA. Simon was quiet, but equally graceful in his own way. He lowered his voice when divulging impolite bits of information, and washed his hands religiously. River laughed at Simon’s hand washing and hung from the crossbars of the ceiling, which somehow resembled Angel’s abode. Sometimes they weren’t safe from the Wolfram & Hart’s plans together. Sometimes River ran off by herself, killing or leaving Simon all alone. There were dreams where she cut off Simon’s hand and he still begged her to stay but she left him marooned on some backwater moon. Other nights Simon wasn’t River’s brother at all, but her lover and there were baby Tams. The children were always seers like their mother and they laughed at Lindsey, because they always saw him watching. Simon’s hands were strong surgeon’s hands, and they always did exactly what he wanted them to. Lindsey still didn’t trust his new hand and its foreign desires. Lindsey woke with a start, the side of his face red and stuck to the surface of his desk, some clever alloy that hadn’t been invented on Earth That Was.

It was inevitable that Lindsey would eventually try one of his schemes to screw Wolfram & Hart, and prove to himself he wasn’t a slave, here in the future. Maybe that’s why the Senior Partners gave him this case, to rile him out of his apathy. You couldn’t hurt someone who didn’t care. The Tams were just the kind of project that triggered Lindsey’s dormant humanity. The more he looked at the files, the more he felt he had to find the two, not to turn them in to the Alliance like the firm wanted, but to help them. Of course, Lindsey was aware that this was probably the idea, that they would use his attempted help against the Tams, but he couldn’t help trying. He especially couldn’t stand still after he found the Miranda footage. It made the massacre in Holland’s wine cellar look like child’s play. Lindsey told himself he wanted to help the Tams, but the truth of the matter was that he wanted them to help him. He wanted them to help him do something good in much the same way he had wanted Angel to help him back before he’d been moved forward in time. The difference was that Lindsey was willing to do a lot more for that help now than he had been in LA. It might have been a side effect of the time travel.

The Alliance had actually done themselves a disservice when they murdered all of Serenity’s contacts. Alive, the contracts might have led searchers right to Malcolm Reynolds and his crew; now that they were dead, there was no guessing who might have information of the fugitives. Lindsey thought, not for the first time, that the military really ought to stay out of delicate situations like this and leave it to professionals like Wolfram & Hart… not that the firm was called Wolfram & Hart anymore. However, finding the Tam siblings was only one of the obstacles to his plans. Keeping the firm from finding out that he’d discovered them was a definite second, and even if he did manage to reach Simon and River, how was he going to convince them to trust him. Deciding to start with the first problem and worry about the others later, Lindsey started searching for non-business related connections that the crew of Serenity might have. To begin with it seemed like a bust, considering that many of their families were long gone, or, in the Tams case, estranged. He thought maybe he’d gotten somewhere when he found intel on the mechanic, one Kaylee Fry. A young single female, described by the Alliance officer who had interrogated the crew a while back as teeth grindingly perky, Lindsey figured the girl had to have some connections back home. There wasn’t a scrap of mail though, not a single wave. Lindsey had almost forgotten that he’d had any mail directed at Serenity’s crew members diverted to him, since it hadn’t panned out, when a hand addressed, brown paper, package had showed up on his desk, addressed to Jayne Cobb. 

The name barely looked familiar because Lindsey had pegged the merc as the least likely candidate for family ties. Apparently Lindsey still wasn’t very good at placing bets though, because Jayne (what kind of a name was that for a muscled near giant that resembled some of the demons they had guarding the confidential files than Lindsey himself anyway) did have a family, and kept in touch with them. Scanning the letter, badly spelled with inept penmanship, Lindsey learned that Jayne sent money home, long after he had stopped doing so himself. It reminded Lindsey of the sort of self-sacrificing campaign that Angel and his minions would have liked. Personally, Lindsey was more the kamikaze type. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been considering what he was considering in the first place. They didn’t need him, but he needed them, so he was going to find a way to make them let him in on their daring heroics. The first thing was to find a way off this space station and onto some border moon where the crew would be more likely not to shoot any stranger that approached them as a fed. So he added a postscript to Jayne’s Ma’s letter, and set off to see whether the man cared enough to come back and see his family when they asked.

It seemed that the man did care, and possessed enough sway on the ship to get his way, that or the sound of someone being happy to see them sounded good to the whole crew. Either way, Lindsey didn’t have to wait long for Serenity to appear at the Cobb homestead. Things were different out on the rim and, once he’d changed his suit out for more rustic gear and mounted a horse, people started talking to him like a human being again. He could almost pretend that he’d really escaped the firm’s reach, that the reason he was out here was that they couldn’t reach him here. The drawl to his voice became stronger. Still it was weeks before he actually got a chance to lay eyes on either of the Tams.

He saw the girl first. She was humming, lithe fingers tracing a fencepost as Lindsey came upon her on what passed for a road. Perhaps more like the insane vampiress Drusilla, than the contracted seers the firm hired. There was more than just ordinary prophecy that had fried up her brain. Lindsey had known that, had seen the Miranda footage and read the file that connected it to River Tam, but it was different to see her here, lucid and yet unaware. He was contemplating approaching her when Kaylee Fry, Lindsey recognized her from the files, came rushing across the field to lecture River about how she shouldn’t be out on her own. Her gaze fell on Lindsey and she blushed, making some excuse about her “cousin”. Lindsey smiled indulgently, like maybe he thought she was pretty, and offered to walk her a piece, leaning against the fence like the boys back home. She said yes, like he’d known she would, but River watched him intently, like she knew something, and Lindsey prayed she wasn’t about to rat him out. He stood there in suspense, as she looked him over, and was rewarded with her skipping on ahead suddenly.

After that, it was easy to get acquainted with the rest of Serenity’s crew. He was always nervous River would know, until one day she told Inara, whom they were gathering flowers with on the hillside, “He’s afraid. Afraid I’ll see. But he’s not a wicked man, thinks he is but he’s not. Wants to be a crusader, like Mal and we’ll help him.”

The first time that Lindsey met Simon, Simon reminded him of his favorite brother. Anthony had been too refined, too delicate, for the life they’d been born to. So it had been a tragedy, but not a surprised, when he left it. The girls had cried and hugged one another, and clung to Lindsey. Later on, when he’d been alone where no one could see, Lindsey had cried too. Simon wasn’t dead though, had persevered. He hadn’t lost that softness either, the quality of otherworldliness, something that his sister radiated obviously, but he shared in much more subtly. Simon’s hands were steady, his voice rational; he seemed solid, but there was a purity, a clearness as if all the grime of the ‘verse had failed to stick to him. Lindsey was fascinated, aware as he was of his own dirty hands. Simon wasn’t Anthony; no, he was going to survive. River wandered in behind them, and Simon was a different person, full of life and concern and single-minded focus on the sister he’d sacrificed everything for. He looked willing to give up a whole lot more. Lindsey had never seen anything more compelling. Angel was nothing to this. Lindsey had often theorized that he should have joined a cause he believed in, instead of an evil law firm. They’d offered to pay off his student loans though, offered him everything he’d ever dreamed about having, and he’d bitten in to the poisoned apple without the slightest hesitation. Simon had spit it back out. Lindsey could feel the poison coursing through his veins even now, and knew it would always be there. Simon was free of the taint and Lindsey felt drawn to that, but he wasn’t sure exactly what he meant to do about it. He did know that Simon, and the rest of the crew, had a mission, and that he wanted to be part of the campaign too. He needed it.

He had expected that I would be harder to convince Captain Malcolm Reynolds to let him in on the crusade. Considering how Angel had always succumbed in the same fashion, behind hard sounding threats of disbelief, he shouldn’t have. Most of the time it was crime, petty and small, but that didn’t bother Lindsey. After his time as a lawyer for the forces of evil, he didn’t exactly have much respect left for the law. Mal was a lot like Angel really. His heart was in the right place but his methods were atrocious and pigheaded. Lindsey kept back the words of criticism though. He’d never wanted to be leader. He might have been disillusioned though, wondering if there was any point to his being there at all, had it not been for Simon. Simon reminded him of the reason he was here, far more than River herself does. River was evidence of the atrocity of the alliance, but Lindsey had seen a lot of atrocious things in his time, and that wasn’t what made the difference. What made the difference was the light in Simon’s eyes as he watched her, the way the dropped everything, anything, without notice, if he thought River needed or wanted him. That was something worth fighting for.

Sometimes, when River was not around, Lindsey thought he detected a little sadness in Simon’s eyes as he looked at Kaylee laughing with Jayne, maybe even a bit of envy when the titan would squeeze her possessively. With River’s return all signs of that would vanish though. Lindsey never suspected that Simon really regretted focusing on River instead of maintaining his relationship with the bubbly mechanic. The siblings adored each other, though in very different ways. Lindsey wondered what it would have been like to only have one. Back home there’d been so many of them, so many options, that priorities could never have been clear like that, even when you made an alliance, it had been easily broken for another. Not so with the Tam siblings. Not surprisingly, Simon envied that bond, the way that River was the center of Simon’s life. 

One night, after a dinner during which Inara had recounted the story of Mal’s dueling adventure and how she’d tried in vain to teach him how to use a sword, Lindsey and Simon were the last ones left in the kitchen. Still thinking of the story, Lindsey asked Simon if he knew how to use a sword. Simon replied that he’d had fencing classes but never learned to really hurt people. The privilege of the rich, Lindsey thought to himself. Simon had given up that life though, and when Lindsey suggested they practice sword fighting together, Simon agreed without hesitation.

They got the chance to start when they went planet side a few days later to make some repairs. A couple of cast off weapons were easy to procure, and the two men went off into the desert away from prying eyes. At first their moves were cautious, polite even. Lindsey suspected that they wanted their swords to clash, rather than to slice flesh. Slowly, but surely though, as the day wore on, and the sweltering heat left them sticky with sweat, the weariness actually made them more aggressive, blood pumping faster. Lindsey was the first one to draw blood, and the knowledge of that excited him a little; perhaps, he’d been around vampires and the like a little too long. Before long they were both covered in small wounds, nothing serious but enough to have their adrenaline rushing by the time they collapsed on the ground exhausted. Lindsey looked over at Simon’s aristocratic face, stained with blood and sweat, and wanted nothing more than to possess him, to command his full blown attention and desire for even an hour.

Perhaps sensing Lindsey’s unrest, Simon began talking, about Osiris, about his childhood pet (a large white tom cat named Galahad) and the way that things had been before he’d known that the world was such an ugly place. Lindsey laughed and suggested that it was before he knew the world had ugly men like him in it. Simon flushed as he refuted this statement, embarrassed to say that Lindsey was far from an ugly man, although Lindsey had meant it in a psychological sense. Lindsey watched Simon’s face color and noticed the telltale waver in Simon’s voice, one that betrayed something Lindsey hadn’t hoped enough to look for.

His lips were on Simon’s before he would get another word out. Hungry desire, overtaking them where aggression had been shortly before, and Simon moaned into Lindsey’s mouth. Bashfulness was forgotten, in one of Lindsey’s insane crusades. It seemed like this might go as desired, Lindsey’s schemes usually did, before Simon pulled away, lips swollen and more pink than usual, protesting and apologizing. Lindsey didn’t have to hear what Simon was saying to know what he meant. River. Simon couldn’t be with Lindsey because his heart belonged to River, and his devotion and loyalty would always be to her. Lindsey contradicted Simon. They could do this. Simon’s heart belonged to River but his body was free. Lindsey didn’t expect anything, wasn’t asking Simon to make him the center of Simon’s universe instead of River. Inwardly, Lindsey knew that it was half a lie, that the devotion Simon reserved for River was what he wanted, but he’d take what he could get. So he promised to leave if things got weird, promised to do whatever Simon wanted, just please, wouldn’t Simon let them have this one time.

Simon’s skin was soft and smooth like a woman’s, as Lindsey peeled his clothing away, worshipping Simon’s body with his hands, the calloused hands of a worker against the flesh of the near divine aristocracy. Lindsey had been upper class for a decade, but that’s how it felt. Oh how the Adonis of the far future whimpered and groaned under him though. He almost reveled in his own crudeness, rough and unrefined as he surely left angry marks on the other man’s skin. Maybe part of him wanted to get back at Simon a little, for being so very unavailable, for having someone that was his sun and his stars. The knowledge made Lindsey more fervent in his anger. Darla could have been his everything, had eclipsed his world, but she was gone; they’d taken her away; Angel had taken her away, Lindsey thought to himself venomously as he pushed harder against Simon. Slick with sweat, it was a bitter comfort he found him Simon’s arms, and one that would cost him the little bit of direction he’d thought he had found.

As they tidied themselves afterwards, Lindsey was sure they both knew it had been a mistake. The proceeded in awkward politeness though; mistakes weren’t something to talk about in the aftermath.


End file.
